Benjamin Netanyahu describes how Iran has allegedly continued with its nuclear capabilities, in Tel Aviv, Israel Monday.
Photograph: Jim Hollander/EPA

If the reports are true, it was the heist of the century. Israeli spies are said to have broken into a secret Tehran warehouse in January, stolen a half-tonne of documents and somehow spirited them back to Israel the same night.

That version of events, recounted in the New York Times, raises important questions about the documents presented by Benjamin Netanyahu on Monday as proof of Iranian dishonesty about its nuclear weapons programme.

For example, why were the presumed crown jewels of Iranian national security not better guarded? Was there a struggle to get into the warehouse, an “inside man”, or was there just a padlock?

“There was nothing there. There was nothing that the IAEA did not know, and all the theatrics and circa-2004 PowerPoint were a bit silly,” said Alexandra Bell, a former state department expert, now senior policy director at the Centre for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation.

Nuclear deal: Netanyahu accuses Iran of cheating on agreement

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At least some of the unanswered questions may yet be resolved when Israel shares the trove with other governments and the IAEA, but by then Netanyahu’s multimedia show-and-tell is likely to have had its intended effect: to provide political cover for US withdrawal from the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran.

Donald Trump is threatening to stop issuing presidential waivers on nuclear-related sanctions when the next tranche is due on 12 May, which would mark an abrogation of the agreement, the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), even if Trump does not formally announce withdrawal.

That would open a rift with Washington’s European allies France, the UK and Germany, who are also party to the JCPOA and remain its strong supporters. London and Paris issued statements on Tuesday stressing that they have been aware of Iranians’ past weapons design work for many years, and it was precisely that awareness that drove their negotiating positions in the two years of talks leading up the deal.

Despite such adamant opposition from key allies to Trump’s threatened violation of the deal, the White House seized on Netanyahu’s documents. In its eagerness to embrace the message the press secretary, Sarah Sanders, put out a statement that claimed: “Iran has a robust, clandestine nuclear weapons programme.”

That assumption underpinned the JCPOA. So far, nothing from the Israeli document trove represents a direct violation of the deal, or contradicts the IAEA’s judgment in December 2015 that there had been no evidence of Iranian work on nuclear weapons design after 2009.

In its only response to the Netanyahu’s presentation so far, the IAEA simply restated the formal findings of its director general, Yukiya Amano, in 2015, that there appeared to have been a “coordinated effort” in Iran on weapons development up to 2003.

After that, there were more dispersed “feasibility and scientific studies” until 2009, and that were “no credible indications of activities in Iran relevant to the development of a nuclear explosive device after 2009”.

The Israeli documents do, however, highlight one of the compromises underlying the JCPOA. The IAEA had been pursuing evidence of nuclear weapons design since 2005, after a laptop containing files on nuclear weapons design had been smuggled out of Iran and handed to the CIA.

By February 2008, the head of the safeguards department, Olli Heinonen, believed there was enough evidence to brief the IAEA board, and his inspectors continued to press for access to the places and people linked to the “Amad” nuclear weapons project, in particular, its chief scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh. The Iranians stonewalled, however, and the IAEA never got to interview Fakhrizadeh or his colleagues.

The JCPOA did not resolve the impasse, but shelved it. The parties agreed the deal could not go into force until the IAEA had closed its file on past weaponisation issues. Amano did so in December 2015 with a “final assessment”, summarising what the IAEA knew, without the benefit of the interviews and inspections the safeguards department wanted. Those were mostly under the control of the Revolutionary Guard and therefore quite possibly not in the gift of Hassan Rouhani, the president of Iran.

It was a political fix that made some uneasy, like Heinonen who argued that the IAEA was debasing its own currency as the gold standard of nuclear verification.

The new documents could well re-open this dilemma, possibly identifying sites of past weaponisation work that IAEA inspectors could ask to visit, maybe triggering stand-offs with the Iranian military. Or they could prevent the IAEA reaching a formal “broader conclusion” that Iran’s nuclear programme is for exclusively peaceful means – a milestone which was envisioned in the first decade of the JCPOA’s implementation.

“The IAEA’s final assessment was a bit of a fudge. They didn’t quite close it as put it on a back burner. This makes it difficult to do that,” said Ian Stewart, a former UK counter-proliferation official now at King’s College London.

Under the JCPOA certain restrictions on Iran’s nuclear activities lift after eight years or when the IAEA reaches its “broader conclusion”.

“It would leave us in a politically untenable situation, with the restrictions on the programme lifted de facto by the clock, rather than the IAEA satisfying itself that Iran activities are of a purely peaceful nature,” Stewart said.

Such dilemmas may not arise however, if Trump – emboldened by Netanyahu’s documents – succeeds in killing off the JCPOA in the coming weeks or months.